MONTREAL - While images of piles of cash being handed over to mobsters in dimly lit backrooms certainly won’t help the reputations of several construction executives in Montreal, Canada’s federal police force has also found itself facing harsh criticism following this week’s explosive Charbonneau Commission testimony.

The RCMP spent thousands of hours between 2002 and 2006 monitoring the goings on inside the Café Consenza on Jarry St. using hidden cameras and wiretapping. In the process, they managed to capture footage of several high-profile entrepreneurs in Quebec’s construction industry as they moved in and out of the mob hangout and, in some cases, coughed up thousands of dollars to members of the Rizzuto family.

At the time, however, the Mounties judged the footage of businessmen like Frank Catania, Nicola Milioto, Lino Zambito and Paolo Catania to be “non-pertinent” to their investigation. In Zambito’s case, they didn’t even realize it was him munching on canapés and sipping cocktails at the Rizzuto Christmas party in December 2005.

The “pertinent” information — namely anything related to the Mafia’s drug operations — was eventually presented in court and led to the arrest and conviction of dozens of mobsters. The rest of the thousands of hours of video and audio evidence, some of it never reviewed by anyone, apparently went into storage. That’s where it stayed until almost six years later, when the Charbonneau Commission’s team of investigators asked if they might take a peek, just in case. The RCMP’s response? A firm No.

It eventually took a court order to convince the force to give the commission investigators what they wanted. The legal wrangling set the Charbonneau Commission back considerably, according to Éric Vecchio, one of the people working on the investigative team.

Michael Kempa, a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa who specializes in public and private policing agencies, says that while all of this may be frustrating, none of it is surprising.

“It’s the tendency of police organizations, not just the RCMP, to withhold information,” Kempa explained. “Basically, the principle is whenever they’re in doubt as to whether they should share information or not, they say no.”

That refusal usually stems from a fear that sharing could spoil ongoing investigations, Kempa said, embarrassing the force that supplied the evidence and potentially leading to the loss of government funding — something every police force fears.

On Thursday, Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay said he was “shocked” that the RCMP didn’t follow up on the construction angle in 2006, or, at the very least, hand the evidence over to provincial or municipal police once they determined it wasn’t going to be useful to them.

“When I saw those images on the television, as a citizen, as the mayor of Montreal, I was profoundly shocked,” Tremblay told reporters. “We should have had access to this information long before … when you see that on television, you ask yourself how it can be that (the RCMP) didn’t move more rapidly.”

Kempa said it would be a mistake to simply chalk it up to incompetence on the part of the federal force.

“People always want to figure out who is to blame,” he said. “Were there personal motivations for not sharing the information? Did they not like each other? That may all go on, but the reason that it goes on is that the architecture for policing federally and provincially and municipally is out of date.”

The police forces are “siloed” to the point where sharing information becomes difficult, Kempa said, and that only encourages them never to attempt it.

Sharing what they know with the Charbonneau Commission seems to be an ongoing issue for the RCMP. In recent months, investigator Vecchio testified, he and his colleagues have been sorting through evidence and in some cases, have made follow-up requests for more tapes and documents.

“There are a lot of (requests) for which there has been no response,” Vecchio said. Seemingly incensed, Justice France Charbonneau asked him to whom these requests had been made.

“Different forces ... obviously, the files that we want the most are those of the RCMP,” Vecchio responded.

There was also backlash on social media this week from people watching the hearings unfold live on the commission’s website. Many were angry that the Mounties had not only dubbed some videos “non-pertinent,” but had gone so far as to turn off the microphones in the Consenza Café during certain potentially key conversations between construction and Mafia bosses. Vecchio explained on Thursday that in those cases, it was often a matter of legality. If the people involved in the conversation were not listed on the original warrant, he said, the police technically had no legal right to be listening in.

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